A Shadow in Yucatan

Recaptures the dying sixties, through the voices of her generation, Stephanie walks through pregnancy to pain, finding unexpected friends in unlikely places, and a growing instinct for truth and generosity. A true story, recounted on a beach in Yucatan, this distilled novel rekindles the optimism of innocence when all things still seemed possible. ...enthralling...impossible to put down...IRS Magazine

Format

Kindle ebook

Published

6 Jul 2014

Pages

122

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Book Details

Philippa Rees is as an immediately distinctive and striking poet who writes with unfashionably – often brilliant – painterly verbal play and colour, oozing with a sensuous love of language. Rees’s almost tangible style dazzles with imagistic chiaroscuro; stark contrasts of light and shade, subtext and texture:
This ripeness of verbiage and intrinsic musicality inevitably bring comparisons with Dylan Thomas (particularly the densely descriptive, rumble-tumble list- passages of Under Milk Wood): But this is not to detract from Rees’s individuality, which, throughout this book of poetic narrative interspersed with colourful dialogue, is palpable and often beguiling

I can’t help hearing Richard Burton’s silvery intoning of ‘the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives’. But this is not to detract from Rees’s individuality, which, throughout this book of poetic narrative interspersed with colourful dialogue, is palpable and often beguiling. She is prone to the lingering aphorism that is imaginatively her own – ‘The cradle of compassion lies in an open palm’; ‘Nights are cloth soup silence’; ‘…alone in triptych of frescoed gilt…’ – and the unforgettable image – sometimes oblique, but still workably so:
'Lethargy, that toothless crone, skims perpetual
indifference from the cream of richer care.'

For my part, I read A Shadow in Yucatán mainly for its poetry, its play with language, image and sound, rather than strictly trying to follow the actual narrative. Approaching this book with a sort of Negative Capability, I experienced it in terms of descriptive impression, verbal effect. In this respect, A Shadow in Yucatán is disarmingly beautiful.

Books by Philippa Rees

A light-hearted journey through creation's evolution and its legacy:memory. In the company of Reason and Soul memory's recovery is traced through the intuitions of scientific genius. Painters and Musicians keep pace in this sweep of symphonic prose. From early Greece to the dissolution of Modernism mind and matter, first divided , now re-approach their recovered Unity.
Adding Involution is adding yeast to flour; it bakes a lighter loaf.